In 2010, Anil Mathews, chief executive and founder of AdNear Pte Ltd, and his team travelled across the country to map various parts in a bid to create location-based advertising platform for mobile phone users.

AdNear did not use the global positioning system, or GPS, for online tracking, which most other advertising companies typically do. Instead, his company built its own platform to identify locations based on a combination of location data from mobile towers and Wi-Fi networks and relay location-centric advertisements to consumers.